Posts by Andrew Bolton 67 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2007
Oops, yes, my mistake. Too early on a Monday morning.
Density of platinum is 21 times that of water - it's the 3rd densest element. Still talking ~5%/vol of platinum in the rock, which considering the richest deposits on earth are at about 0.5ppm, is quite impressive/doubtful. My scepticism of the calculation still stands :).
Don't know if it's El Reg or somewhere else, but 400x1000m = 400,000m3. Density of platinum is ~21t/m3. So if it was PURE platinum, there might be ~9m tons of it, not 90m. And it's fairly unlikely to be pure. Not looked up any other sources on this, so don't know who's made the mistake.
Yes it is. The welfare state does not take money from anybody (that's the job of the inland revenue). It gives money and benefits-in-kind to everybody (including NHS and education). So it does make us all "richer". That is the ENTIRE point of the article and if you don't understand it, you should read it again until you do.
We can only go back to 19th century wealth inequality if the welfare state goes back to the 19th century. Which despite whinges about NHS going downhill etc etc just is never going to happen. Any NHS is better than none at all. Any state education is better than none at all, etc.
Correction needed, I think - Website says 5.66TWh per day, which is an extremely different thing. "terawatts per day" doesn't even make any sense, a Watt is a per time unit.
It's also interesting that website says instantaneous output is around 7GW, from 230000 installations. That's about THREE nuclear reactors.
...It's plainly not the same one as the rest of us.
"If Apple's agency model briefly raised the prices of a few digital bestsellers – blink and you'll have missed it – Amazon nevertheless continued to discount the vast majority of ebooks heavily across the line."
When Amazon are forced to sell EVERY bestseller Kindle edition for MORE than the hardback, you know something is wrong somewhere.
I'm generally with Orlowski and his climate realism, but even I would baulk at calling 2ppm CO2 rise on a total of 390 (up from a pre-industrial 280 average) a "mere" rise. That's a pretty big number and I think you betray your prejudices by calling this "mere". Keep posting the articles, but I think you'd be a lot more persuasive if you actually acknowledged one of the few properly measurable numbers in climate science with less pejorative language.
... if it was from code written 17 days ago, I'd be more worried, frankly. The headline seems to imply we should be greatly surprised that the bug has existed this long. I doubt very much if there is incentive to go back and security-check 17 year old code. I'd prefer they devote time to audit any new code written.
Where's the mountain out of a molehill icon? I'll just go with beer. I like beer.
Me and the other half have used MS Office Accounting Express to do the records for her small consultancy business (1 employee, 2 clients, not VAT registered, no PAYE), mainly because it was FREE. Not the easiest product in the world to use, but seemed to do the job ok.
We got an email saying it would no longer be supported, but we could have a FREE migration to Mamut Mini. Had a look at the details, and it's only in the small print that you find out that it's 1 year free, then it's £59+VAT/year and "The Mamut Service Agreement is compulsory from year 2". Which in my book, certainly isn't free. So I'll be sticking with MSOA Express, because for the moment, it does all we need it to do.
I can fully understand cutting a product that isn't making any money, but don't peddle some alternative to a free product that looks free but isn't. I wonder how much Mamut (who I'd never heard of, I have to admit) is paying MS for the privilege of taking on its users?
"In a population of 56 million, 200,000 signatures can be still be considered a statistically biased sample. Sorry, f**k off."
Well duh, moron. Of COURSE it's statistically biased - you've got a sample of people who wouldn't sign the damn petition unless they agreed with it's proposal. Of COURSE petitions are one sided, you arrogant idiot with verbal diarrhoea. But then you get a government that says councils should respond to petitions while totally failing to respond to them itself. EVERY SINGLE petition on the No10 site is fobbed off, whether it has 10 signatures or 1.2 million. Why bother? Obviously to continue to maintain the illusion that the government actually listens to the people. And anyone that says it's always been like this is as delusional as you are, Luther. This nu-labour government has taken spin over substance to extraordinary heights - they spend 3 times more on advertising now than in 1997.
Like No.10 does?
"Yes. You've got 200,000 people to sign a petition. But we're still right and you're wrong. Why? Because we are. We know best. Big Brother always knows best. And we know where you all live now. And we've got your DNA and your fingerprints. So if you ever sign a nasty petition like that again we're going to send round some big men with hammers. So there. Nah nah nah nah nah. Sucks to be you."
Respond like that maybe? Cunning. Useless idiots, the lot of them. And they wonder why we don't have respect for politics anymore?
A Penguin, because he'd like this weather.
I have - the pre-scanner anyway. Never mind other people paying for bandwidth - I'm "paying" for using my own incoming bandwidth in performance drops.
In the LinkScanner config, turn off AVG Search Shield, but leave on AVG Active Search Shield. Clearly, that's obvious.
So that's one out of 20m the webmasters of the world don't have to worry about. You can all thank me later.
This is the same Internet Gambling industry that Germany has banned?
No state gambling monopolies in the EU, oh no. Apart from Germany. And France. And probably some others I don't know about now that the EU is bigger than South America.
Please, Sweden, can you ban online gambling too? Might improve my Pokerstars ROI. Always getting beaten by some ultra-aggressive Stockholm-ian :-)
"We used to just carry on regardless. What changed?"
I suspect what has changed is that some very nasty people, mostly in the USA, realised they could make really vast amounts of money and wield a lot of power by making sure people stayed as scared as possible.
Andrew
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Google Pleasby, find a book impression about Forest Scenery, google some other places near it, notice there is another edition of the same book where Pleasby is now called Pleasley. Find Pleasley on maps. There is a wood to the NE of it, just north of Pleasley Vale. And although it says Derbyshire on Google maps, the Notts/Derbys border runs right through it.
T'internet's marvellous, isn't it?
I'm an obese smoker. Can I take the money now please?
As to "Dead people don't contribute anything in tax" - WHAT? You've never heard of the gross injustice that is inheritance tax then? The biggest lump sum of tax you'll ever pay Greedy Gordon I expect...
The Penguin, cos he's looking a bit chubby, and is probably sitting down cos of his 20 a day habit. Good socially responsible Penguin.
...Uzi 9mm should be on there.
After all, its "ideal for home defence" :-)
Great list though.
Death Star wins for being most *powerful* weapon, I guess.
Until I think of Soren's firework rocket that makes stars go supernova in Star Trek:Generations of course.
Or are there more powerful weapons in the movieverse?
Kenny
If you pansies up in Scotland didn't take TWO whole bank holidays to recover from New Year's Eve, maybe there'd be more money washing around your economy to pay for it.
Seriously, how much stuff does Scotland get that the English don't get? A parliament that is only open to your countrymen, for instance? Pot, kettle, etc...
Andrew
They coincidentally happen to announce this when the GBP/EUR exchange rate is at the lowest level ever. Useful. 6 months ago it would have meant bringing the UK price to 66p. Now it's more like 74p. How uncannily convenient for them.
Not that I use any Apple product anyway as I don't believe pretty colours are the most important deciding factor when purchasing gadgetery.
Andrew
It'll be infinity. Light/dark = something/zero = infinity...
And John - in any conditions, plasma is better for watching TV than LCD, frankly. The LCD camp is possibly winning the PR war, and I suppose the price war for sub 42inch screens, but they're the only war they're winning. Compare plasma and LCD side by side and I guarantee you'll prefer the plasma.
Andrew
So, 9m a year saved for 10 years = £90m saved (possibly, if take up is actually any good, presumably). Cost of online service improvement, £340m. Is it just me, or is that rather poor return on investment?
Then again, I shouldn't be surprised, with this government's record of throwing huge sums of my money down the drain...
Andrew
There will still be aggressive Norwegians all over the online poker sites, hoovering up my money :-)
Probably worth clarifying that Norway aren't members of the EU, so won't fall foul of EU competition laws if they go ahead. Unlike France, who like to try protect the state gambling monopoly.
Ed Yelland - pics are impressive, but that's from a spill on August 3rd 2006.
Was about to post on the priorities of yanks, vis the "...they will try to salvage as much as corn as possible." being the most important part of the story, and then noticed the date on the story :-)
Andrew
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
